In recent years, as team members’ composition becomes more diverse, a team is usually divided into several subgroups with internal homogeneity and being high heterogeneous from each other under the mutual effects of the multiple characteristics of members. The hypothetical dividing lines between subgroups are called as “faultlines”. As geological faultlines will easily trigger natural disasters such as earthquakes, if without being managed effectively, team faultlines may easily cause “ingroup preference” and “intergroup prejudice” which will hinder communication between subgroups, and even intensify the conflict. Then the managers will meet a new challenge, which is, how to manage team faultlines and apply it effectively. Currently, the related researches mainly focus on the influence of team faultlines on team performance, but few on employees' behavior and performance. In order to complete certain tasks, an employee usually needs to cooperate with other employees, as well as gains the informational and emotional support from them, and thus, his or her performance is easily influenced by the relationship among team members and the team composition. As the increased attention given on the employees' performance management and the development of hierarchical analysis, it is necessary and feasible for us to explore the influence of team faultlines on employees′ performance.
The research aims to comprehensively discuss the hierarchical effect of team faultlines on employees′ performance. Specifically, the authors try to answer the following key questions: How do team faultlines influence employees' performance? In different contexts, how would this influence change? Whether or not team faultlines, as a situational variable, would hierarchically moderate the influence of individual-level factors on employees′ performance?
This research selected a sample composed of 35 work teams including 559 employees in a large manufacturing enterprise located in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The authors collected the data, including team faultlines strength, leadership style, employees′ performance and employee's social network, through a survey targeted towards the team leaders and members. Having used the hierarchical linear model (HLM), the empirical research shows that transactional leadership negatively moderates the relationship between team faultlines and employees′ performance. The negative influence of team faultlines on employees′ performance is stronger for team leader with high transactional leadership. Team faultlines positively moderates the relationships between social network centrality and employees′ performance. When team faultlines are more significant, team member who is at the core of the social network will obtain higher performance. Furthermore, it is worth noting that on the contrary to our hypothesis, this research did not find a significant relationship between team faultlines and employees′ performance. We speculate that this stems from cultural factors. Under a cultural background in which the Chinese core values of collectivism, differing from the western individualism, has been upheld for so many years, team faultlines are not so easily to cause differences and contradictions within a team, and thus the damage to the employees′ performance would not be so strong.
This research expands the hierarchical research of team faultlines, enriches the model of influencing factors on employee performance, and promotes the development of related theory. Furthermore, it also suggests some practical implications about how to manage employees′ performance in those diversified teams. First, the leader who plays an important role in the team should not use transactional leadership style to weaken the differentiation of team faultlines. Secondly, the managers in a diversified team should adjust the structure of the social network within the team, which can be used in its potential to promote the team communication.